Technology Reviews and Podcasts

Personal Rig Introduction & History – Dan Style

I am the resident IT Unprofessional here on RedBlueGreen and the Technobabble Podcast, as well as the Team Blue/Green voice of reason to Jeff’s dinstinctly Red-coloured outlook on life.

My story starts in the early-to-mid 90s, as a young, bright eyed, blond-haired kid wasted away his childhood on his family’s PCs playing video games, rather of doing what normal kids would do – go outside…..and then walk to their friends’ houses and play NES and SNES instead. The moral of our sad story is that outside sucks, and I don’t recommend going there.

I was never really a big hardware guy in my earlier years, but my father certainly was (and still is). We had all sorts of electronic equipment laying around the basement in various states of disrepair. I learned a lot from him, but most of my interest lay in the software side.

My first real computer of my own was the Toshiba Satellite I bought for college, as a laptop was required. There was no real choice, as I bought the thing from the college itself to keep life simple (no doubt at a premium, but laziness won the day). It was no gaming rig, but it had enough to play my vice at the time – World of Warcraft. Sure, it got a little hot in…inconvenient…areas, but dang if it didn’t get the job done for work and play.

In fact, the laptop is still in service, somewhere in my dad’s pile of “semi-working” electronics, which is impressive.

Eventually I earned enough money to realize a misguided childhood dream, and purchased a shiny Alienware M17X.

This monster of a “desktop replacement system” cost far too much money and ran far, far too loud and hot, but it was a beast and it looked good doing it. Sporting an early i7 970 and dual Mobile Radeon HD 4870s, this thing could keep pace with the best of em…for a few hours, anyway, before the WASD keys became too hot to use without risk of second degree burns.

After a far-too-short run with the Alienware, I decided to go big and cool, and finally build my own monster gaming rig, running unning with a gargantuan Cooler Master HAF X, an i7-2600K with a modest overclock, an ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard, 16GB Corsair DDR3 RAM, and beastly EVGA GTX 590 Classified.

This machine served me very well, and I used it until just recently. I decided to move to the Skylake/DDR4 platform, which in hindsight was a thoroughly unnecessary upgrade. The old system is still running very well for a friend, albeit in a slightly more managable NZXT Phantom 410 case with a Radeon R9 380.

My current rig is a fun one, enclosed in a shiny In Win 303 case (yeah, I copied Jeff), and sporting an i7-6700K, 32GB Corsair Vengeance LED RAM, an ASUS Maximus VIII Hero motherboard, and an EVGA GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ graphics card. Oh, and an “out-of-curiosity” Samsung 950 Pro NVMe SSD. I call it the Shining Abyss, due to both its look and its impact on my wallet.

In conclusion, I’ve made many questionable, expensive choices in my personal computer career, but I’ve had a lot of fun along the way….and really, that’s what’s most important, right?